Related Publication

This project was presented at the Augmented Humans International Conference 2026 (AHs 2026) in Okinawa.

Flying at Your Fingertips: Input Mapping Strategies for Fingertip Force-Based 3D Locomotion Shun Kondoh, Takeru Hashimoto, Yutaro Hirao, Takuji Narumi The Augmented Humans International Conference 2026 (AHs 2026), Okinawa, Japan, March 16–19, 2026 📄 PDF

Overview

Free 3D navigation is becoming increasingly important across applications such as VR locomotion, drone teleoperation, and remote robotics. Yet today’s options each have downsides: joystick-based control takes time to master, while body-motion interfaces tend to be tiring and demand space.

This project explores fingertip force input as an alternative — a way to drive high-dimensional control with very small physical motion.

YUBI: 4-DoF Locomotion via Fingertip Force

We built YUBI, a system that maps the direction and magnitude of forces applied by both thumbs into 3D translation + yaw (4-DoF) locomotion, and evaluated it through a tunnel-traversal task.

We compared five different mapping strategies for force-to-motion. The findings:

• Naively replicating the displacement-based mapping of a joystick on a force-input device significantly degrades performance, due to cross-axis interference.
• Our proposed “wheel-like” redundant mapping — which integrates 6-DoF force input from both thumbs — matched the precision of a gamepad while scoring higher on intuitiveness and embodiment.

Design Implications

Force-input interfaces should not simply emulate the control schemes of displacement-based controllers. Leveraging redundancy and real-world metaphors instead is what allows precision, intuitiveness, and physical comfort to coexist. These findings inform the design of next-generation human interfaces that exploit our body’s intrinsic sense of control — drone control, VR locomotion, and tele-robotics among them.